Monthly Archives: October 2017

What is a Heavy Use Area? Well let me share; it is the area that gets walked on, driven on, played on the most in the pasture by animals, humans, trucks, and tractors. Our heavy use area is not only qualifies as all of the above, but; it is an area where rain collects during any heavy down pours, during the freezing/thawing time of year which creates big issues because it gets really mushy in that space.

So how do you fix that? Let me share how we did it, some things we are learning to help you in the event you too, need to make some changes or adjustments to your heavy use area.

There were going to be multiple blogs to this topic since we have multiple stages of development. But we actually finished it while in the process of writing this so you will get the whole picture.

One stage is to divert as much rain water as possible and that update will come in the future. The phase we are working on has to deal with making the ground stronger. We are doing a 2400 square foot area, well, maybe a bit more. It is about 32’x85’. After scraping out all the loose soil, weeds, grass and whatever else might have been down there, we laid out and staked in place an 8oz Geo Textile that we picked up from CMA Supply or currently known as Carter Waters. They are located in Fort Wayne. I have to laugh, even though it is 8oz fabric, I thought it would be really heavy since it is a roll 15 feet by 300 feet. Yes, it sounds huge! However, it fit nicely on [...]

You may wonder, what does this info have to do with raising Bison? Well, we have fence and we need to mow around the fence line. What if you lose steering while you are mowing? What if you hear fluid gurgling in the steering shaft? What if there is fluid coming up the steering shaft and out from under the steering wheel. Below we share what to do if your CASE 480 C has any of these problems. Talking with the parts guy at RPM machinery in Fort Wayne he says there is a seal kit we need to put in the bottom of the shaft. They tend to go bad and leak their way up the steering shaft. Sounds like that is happening to us. Have a photo here.

There is power steering fluid running down the steering shaft and you can see it has dripped on the floor pan.

Purchased the seal kit last week from RPM Machinery and had my mechanic start working to do the repair. I will share briefly how it gets done, however; you can always check with the guys at RPM, they are great help.

Getting started, remove the steering wheel by removing the center nut and using a puller to remove the wheel. You may damage the plastic like we did, but there is metal underneath. Next remove the outer shaft, and knowing that the seal leaked, you will end up with some nasty power steering oil all over the floor and possibly yourself. There are 2 snap rings that need removed and we removed the lower pin. There are 2 pins, and again, we punched out the lower pin and off comes the steering shaft. That leaves the [...]